This study compared three reading skill areas (recalling details, understanding a main idea not explicitly stated, and making inferences) in Spanish, the subjects' native language, and American English, their second language. The sample consisted of 47 adults from nine Latin American countries and Puerto Rico who were completing an intensive ESOL…

Disciplines interested in communication have failed to describe adequately the comprehension or production of taboo or dirty words with the result that little is known about the phenomenon. A review of research leads to the assumption that taboo word comprehension and production are the result of some or all of the following elements of the…

This is a report on a child's English and French speech before, during and after a summer vacation in France. The findings are based on recorded samples of her speech in both languages elicited at three times: (1) immediately preceding the trip at age 3 years, 8 months; (2) 2 and l/2 months later; and (3) again 2 and l/2 months after her return to…

After a critical examination of four assumptions of current procedures in language assessment, it is argued that the pragmatic domain of language ability should be the first to be assessed. A study designed to determine the usefulness of language variation (the number of different structures a child can produce or comprehend) as an alternative…

Three similar experiments were conducted to assess language variation and politeness in the speech of English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children, and in Armenian children learning English as a second language. Each experiment elicited request strategies from the children with the use of puppets in a structured conversation. While…

A study was conducted to supply data on the characteristics of young adult Chicanos compared with their Anglo peers. A stratified random sample of undergraduate Mexican-American (N=153) and Anglo (N=148) students was taken at the University of Texas, El Paso, where one third of the students enrolled have a Spanish surname. A self-devised…

This paper describes the past assumptions about the mismatch of child language and school language, noting the distance principle, the characteristics of language interference and the various treatments that have been hypothesized. Past research involving language mismatch and reading is reviewed, and it is noted that even though the best evidence…

This study investigated results of a study that focused on the choice made by three anglophone Canadian graduates of a French immersion program in elementary and junior high school to take high school core courses in French. Specifically, the study examined the students' decisions regarding postsecondary education, career choices, language-related…

Sociolinguistic Studies in a Data Base of Spoken Swedish (Sprakdata) is a project to describe the language from a semantic-communicative point of view. The purposes are to (1) investigate the possibility of grouping informants based on results of a semantic-communicative analysis of recorded spoken language and (2) examine possible…

A comparison of the salient characteristics of Canadian and United States bilingual education programs suggests various settings where it would be desirable to introduce children to schooling in their home language. These settings include: (1) the various ethnic communities in the United States, (2) multilingual developing countries, (3) parts of…

The language learner is activated by exposure to primary linguistic data in the target language, categorizes that data and deduces from it a system of rules or hypotheses. When the language acquisition process is successful, as is virtually always the case in first language acquisition, the learner's rule system corresponds to that of the speech…

Dialect writing in nineteenth-century America has been used as a source of evidence about popular American language and culture. Works employing dialect have been studied as documents embodying perceptions of the relation between character, role, and moral values on the one hand, and speech variety on the other. Critics have noticed the difference…

It is possible to communicate effectively in a second language in spite of highly deviant pronunciation and grammar as long as messages are semantically coherent and message forms are reasonably appropriate. Until now, research in second language acquisition has focused principally on the processes through which non-native speakers move towards…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…

The purpose of the study reported here was: (1) to determine whether any predictable relationships exist between the spoken language patterns of individuals and those individuals' ethnic attitudes; and (2) to identify the degree of association present among various selected demographic factors, language patterns, and ethnic attitudes. The…